States With Caps on Wrongful Death Damages

By the FigureMyTax Editorial Team · How we calculate

Florida's wrongful death cap didn't survive a constitutional challenge — and it was the first of two Florida Supreme Court rulings that dismantled the state's malpractice damages framework entirely.

The first domino: McCall, 2014

In Estate of McCall v. United States (2014), the Florida Supreme Court struck down the wrongful death noneconomic damages cap in medical negligence cases as unconstitutional, finding no rational basis for the Legislature's claimed medical malpractice insurance crisis. This ruling predates, and set up, the later personal injury ruling in Kalitan (2017).

No dollar cap today

Under Fla. Stat. §768.21, there's no statutory dollar limit on wrongful death damages in Florida, for medical negligence deaths or otherwise.

A categorical limit, distinct from a dollar cap

The absence of a dollar cap doesn't mean every category of survivor recovers freely. §768.21(8) separately excludes adult children, and the parents of an adult child, from pain and suffering damages specifically when the death resulted from medical negligence — a real, narrow limit that operates independently of any cap on the dollar amount itself.

How other states compare

Nationally, states take genuinely different approaches to wrongful death damages. Some fold it into the same noneconomic damages cap that applies to severe personal injury generally. Others set an entirely separate wrongful-death-specific cap. A handful of states, Florida among them, impose no dollar cap on either category — though as Florida shows, "no cap" doesn't always mean every potential claimant recovers identically.

This is general information, not legal advice, and the jurisdiction comparisons above are illustrative, not an exhaustive survey. Confirm the current rule with a licensed attorney.